Firefighters are often faced with the problem of extinguishing a fire within an enclosed engine compartment of an automobile or other vehicle. To accomplish this task and to insure that such a fire has been completely put out it is highly desirable to be able to open the vehicle hood, which, in many vehicles, requires manually operating a cabled hood release handle which is generally accessible from the driver's position. However, this manual hood release is typically remotely connected to a latch on the vehicle hood by a metal cable which passes through, slides within, and is retained by a hollow plastic or spiralled wire sleeve or sheath which is coaxial with the cable. This cable and sleeve assembly operates on the principle of a "boden wire" to allow manual release of the hood latch by tension applied by the release handle through the cable. The heat of a fire within the engine compartment of the vehicle will commonly damage a plastic sleeve or cable housing so that the metal cable is no longer sufficiently retained to allow transmission of a force to the hood latch. In more extreme cases the cable itself may be weakened or completely severed. Under such conditions, even if the manually operable handle portion of the hood release mechanism is accessible in the vehicle's passenger compartment, the hood latch itself may not be remotely releasable by means of this interior hood release. Such a situation has previously required that the vehicle hood be cut or forced open, generally resulting in substantial damage to the body of the vehicle. It has previously not been unusual for the degree or amount of such damage to be greater than that caused by the fire itself, particularly in a situation where an engine compartment fire is small or is extinguished before it causes significant damage. Access to the hood release handle to gain entry to an engine compartment may be hampered because the vehicle doors are locked and may also be hampered by a fire in the passenger compartment which may prevent access to the interior hood release handle or which may damage the handle sufficiently to render it inoperable.